Internet home of Evan May, author of The King in Darkness

I blame the heat

So it has been a really quite substantially hot, sticky week here and to say that I have not enjoyed it would be a bit of an understatement. As I’ve been writing this week I have been tempted to start including all kinds of heat imagery or just hot weather into the story (perhaps I want my characters to share my pain?) but suddenly transporting the action to the middle of the summer would be a bizarre decision even for me. Anyway I didn’t put any of it in, although those of you who read the last couple of blog entries will see that I found another (somewhat arguably nutso) outlet for the heat stuff.

This has gotten me to thinking, today, about one of the challenges, or maybe ramifications (?) of writing something over as long a period as this thing is taking me. It’s entirely possible that not only will I keep being tempted to chuck stuff in that is drawn from whatever is going on with me at the time, but I might change the way I think about characters or scenes part way through. Not exactly sure what to do about that (aside from trying to stifle Statler-and-Waldorfian impulses to mass delete) aside from keeping aware of it.

It wasn’t really a concern with thesis writing because so much of that is tied to what is actually in the evidence and sources and you can’t really run around and make stuff up willy nilly. (Well, very strongly shouldn’t, anyway) Writing fiction is more fun because you can do that, but I guess I need to think about how to make sure what I end up with isn’t an incoherent or schizophrenic disaster area.